On Getting Things Done
I’ve flirted on and off with implementing some sort of GTD system for myself for, well, I don’t even remember how long. What’s been fascinating throughout that period of time is how shockingly little I’ve actually gotten done, both in terms of creative output and in terms of organizing my life into some sort of system that allows me to be productive in the way David Allen’s original Getting Things Done system has for so many other, presumably more normal people.
The Oncoming Rush
At this point, the Spring 2009 semester is about to start up, and I’m about to be thrown back into a world of having class and classwork and homework and projects, and besides all of that having a job and work to do there, and besides all of that playing in a band that’s up-and-coming and starting to get a little bit of exposure on the local scene—with all of the songwriting time and practice time that entails—and besides all of that having a girlfriend and a family and friends—you get the point. Things are about to ramp back up for me, and I’m about to be busy. Really, really busy. I’d like to think that I’m going to be able to handle everything that gets thrown at me over the upcoming semester, but I’m not so sure.
I’m taking sixteen hours this semester, which is more than I’ve taken at any point since my very first semester of college, Fall 2005 at CBU before transferring to Memphis. There’s a reason for that: it didn’t go so well. I was woefully unprepared for that much work, and for college in general—so much so that the next semester, fifteen hours rather than sixteen though it was, was accompanied by weeks of isolation and what was, thus far, the closest I’ve ever come to an actual honest-to-God nervous breakdown. Much of it was the atmosphere, being surrounded by people I didn’t know and who didn’t really have a lot of interest in being my friend, but just as much, if not more, was the fact that I had no idea how to deal with the volume of work I had to do, or how to process and prioritize the number of tasks I was having to simultaneously juggle. Pre-emptive multitasking, shall we say, is not one of my strong points.
Why It Matters
I’m an English major, specifically with a concentration in creative writing. Yeah, yeah, I know it means I’ll be poor and hungry for the rest of my life—but I know that and I’m okay with that, and here’s why: I want to write. Writing is my passion, whether it’s writing fiction or writing here or writing music;being creative—making things—is what I love to do, and what I want to do for the rest of my life. Problem is, doing that, as Merlin Mann has been realizing over the last year, is incredibly difficult, both at the level of getting something down on paper, and the level of having time to sit down at a desk to write to begin with. It’s difficult work, and it’s difficult to make time to do the difficult work.
I want to be at a place where I can, well, have my act together. I need to make time to write, because that’s the only way to get better at writing. I need to make time to get my school work done, because that’s how I pass the classes I need to pass to get my degree. I need to make time to practice with The Sheriffs of Nottingham because that’s the only way we’re going to get any better. On top of this, and more importantly, I need to make time to have a life; that is, I have to make time for the people who are important to me. Things that really matter.
The System
Coming back around to my point about GTD: I’ve owned a copy of Getting Things Done for a couple of years now, and while it helped me at first, as did the plethora of Mac apps that are out there for helping one manage a GTD system (you know what they are: Taskpaper, OmniFocus—for which I was an alpha tester, Things, iGTD, the list goes on), and the Moleskine notebooks I would carry around full of to-do lists and notes and future project ideas (back when I thought I had projects to work on). Then I reached this strange point, about a year and a half ago, where the system started getting more tweaking and upkeep than the things that I actually needed to do. I was spending days and nights trying to decide what application to use and which one kept track of tasks better, rather than doing the Logic homework I needed to do or writing the paper for tomorrow’s Comparative Politics class. The work didn’t get done because the system was eating up all of the time I had for, you guessed it, work.
So then I scrapped the system. I got a weekly planner for $4.99, a folder in which to keep stuff that I needed to keep track of, and a five subject notebook with little pockets on the dividers, into which went homework for each class that needed to be turned in. I made two A’s and a B. Turns out it doesn’t matter what system you use, as long as you—this is the key—do the crap that the system is there to keep track of. Part of me feels like this is lost on the LifeHacker crowd. If the system is the problem, you have to build a new system.
Here’s where I am now, though. I feel like I need something better than what I had now that my workload is increasing, and I’m trying to develop that methodology so I don’t sink under the weight of everything that’s going to be on my shoulders come Thursday morning when classes start. I don’t know what it’s going to look like, and I’m not even 100% certain that I’ll be able to keep my head above water. But. Whatever I do, I have to be in the middle of this continuum:
…which is easier said than done. It’s easy for a nerd like me to become obsessed with the low-level details of a system for being organized—very easy. In fact, I’d say that that’s really what I’ve been doing the whole time I’ve been trying to implement a system to begin with. It’s also easy for someone as completely unorganized as I am to become buried under indiscriminate piles of papers and laundry and coke cans and stacks of books to read and laptops and chargers and magazines and trash bags still sitting around from the last attempt to clean off the desk and start doing things the way they needed to be done—which is where I’m at right now, and which is what is inspiring all of this organizational thinking.
I’m going to try, though, and if I discover anything cool about myself or the nature of being organized while I’m on that path, then I’ll do what I can to share.
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